Unity Power Planner

Breakthrough Power-Grid Planning for Hierarchical Custom Designs

Pulsic Unity Power Planner, a breakthrough automated power-planning product created expressly for custom designs, offers a unique, streamlined methodology for power-grid planning, routing, revision, and reuse.

Unity Power Planner: Speed and Flexibility for Custom Power Planning

Power-grid planning for today’s advanced custom designs with many levels of hierarchy and multiple power domains is a complex, often-iterated task. The traditional, primarily manual, methodology used for custom-design power planning is time-consuming and error-prone, and can’t keep up with the inevitable, frequent changes during chip development.

Pulsic Unity Power Planner offers a unique methodology for power planning and routing by enabling designers to work at a higher level of abstraction, providing greater productivity, flexibility, and portability. With Unity Power Planner, designers capture a power-grid design using guides that are then translated automatically into DRC-correct power routing and strapping. This interactive, easy to use approach produces a power-delivery network model correlated to the layout. Designers can create complex power-routing grids and meshes supporting multiple power domains quickly, and accommodate changes rapidly throughout the design cycle. The power-planning guides created by Unity Power Planner can be saved in a power-planner file and re-used each time the netlist is changed during the lifecycle of the design.

Benefits:

• Quickly explore multiple power grid implementations
• Accurately account for routing resources
• Avoid over sizing power grids to save time
• Easily accommodate multiple power grid adjustments and iterations
• Gain a high degree confidence in power grid integrity
• (more)
• Eliminate “near-tapeout” power-grid LVS issues
• Lower risk of DFM problems
• Produce early SPEF parasitics for IR voltage-drop analysis

Features:

• Automated generation of power-delivery networks for multiple power domains
• Power-planning guides provide a higher level of abstraction and productivity
• User-defined attributes applied to each net and/or guide for easy-to-create power grids, meshes, or custom power routing for soft blocks, hardblocks and standard/multi-height cell areas
• Automatic generation of power routing based on attributes applied to each power-planning guide
• Power-planning guides easily accommodate revisions and facilitate reuse of a power grid in a new design

A Higher Level of Abstraction Increases Productivity, Flexibility and Portability

With Unity Power Planner, designers create hierarchical power-planning guides for all power domains at each hierarchical level by defining attributes, such as guide width, absolute/relative location, metal layer, and type of connection (soft block or hard block). Users have the flexibility to define the power-routing strategy for each level of hierarchy or block-type based upon power-grid type, matching of pre-existing power pins, a specific number of power routes and pin locations, and/or power shut-off requirements.

Unity Power Planning automatically translates these power-planning guides into power routes that correspond to the orientation, location, metal layer, and width attributes applied to the guides. Strapping is completed automatically between any two metal layers where required.

Designers can save the power-planning guide configurations in the floorplan file for later use, either to make revisions to the current netlist or for use in subsequent design projects.